One Summer: America, 1927

think that only a little more than a decade before he became President of the United States, Herbert Hoover, the Great Humanitarian, was engaged in an act that could have led to his being taken outside, stood against a wall and shot.
     
    In 1919, his work in Europe done, Hoover returned permanently to the United States. He had lived abroad for twenty years, and wassomething of a stranger in his own land, yet he was so revered that he was courted as a potential presidential candidate by both political parties. It has often been written that Hoover had been away so long that he didn’t know whether he was a Republican or a Democrat. That is not actually true. He had joined the Republican Party in 1909. But it is true that he wasn’t terrifically political and had never voted in a presidential election. In March 1921, he joined Warren G. Harding’s cabinet as secretary of commerce. After Harding died suddenly in 1923, he continued in the same post under Calvin Coolidge.
    Hoover was a diligent and industrious presence in both administrations, but he was dazzlingly short on endearing qualities. His manner was cold, vain, prickly and snappish. He never thanked subordinates or enquired into their happiness or well-being. He had no visible capacity for friendliness or warmth. He did not even like shaking hands. Although Coolidge’s sense of humour was that of a slightly backward schoolboy – one of his favourite japes was to ring all the White House servant bells at once, then hide behind the curtains to savour the confusion that followed – he did at least have a sense of humour. Hoover had none. One of his closest associates remarked that in thirty years he had never heard Hoover laugh out loud.
    Coolidge kept an exceedingly light hand on the tiller of state. He presided over an administration that was, in the words of one observer, ‘dedicated to inactivity’. His treasury secretary, Andrew Mellon, spent much of his working life overseeing tax cuts that conveniently enhanced his own wealth. According to the historian Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr, with a single piece of legislation Mellon gave himself a greater tax cut than that enjoyed by almost the entire populace of Nebraska put together. Mellon had the Internal Revenue Service send its best men to prepare his tax returns for him with a view to keeping them as small as possible. The head of the IRS even helpfully provided a list of loopholes for Mellon to exploit. As Mellon’s biographer David Cannadine notes, Mellon alsoillegally used his position to promote his business interests – for instance, by asking the secretary of state to help one of his companies secure an engineering contract in China. Thanks to these manoeuvrings, Mellon’s personal net worth more than doubled to over $150 million during his term of office, and the wealth of his family, which he oversaw, topped $2 billion.
    By 1927, Coolidge worked no more than about four and a half hours a day – ‘a far lighter schedule than most other presidents, indeed most other people, have followed’, as the political scientist Robert E. Gilbert once observed – and napped much of the rest of the time. ‘No other President in my time,’ recalled the White House usher, ‘ever slept so much.’ When not napping, he often sat with his feet in an open desk drawer (a lifelong habit) and counted cars passing on Pennsylvania Avenue.
    All this left Herbert Hoover in an ideal position to exert himself outside his areas of formal responsibility, and nothing pleased Herbert Hoover more than conquering new administrative territories. He took a hand in everything – in labour disputes, the regulation of radio, the fixing of airline routes, the supervision of foreign loans, the relief of traffic congestion, the distribution of water rights along major rivers, the price of rubber, the implementation of child hygiene regulations, and much else that often seemed only tangentially related to matters of domestic commerce. He became known to his colleagues as ‘Secretary of Commerce and Undersecretary of Everything Else’. When aeroplane licences were introduced, it was Hoover’s department that issued them. When a cheesy Broadway impresario named Earl Carroll publicly invited high-school girls to audition for his risqué stage shows, it was to Hoover that a group called Moms of America appealed (successfully) for help. When AT&T wished to demonstrate a new invention called television, it was Herbert Hoover who was